Word: parkinsonism
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Most immediately affected will be the six men facing trial on Sept. 30 for their roles in the Watergate cover-up-John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, Kenneth Parkinson, Gordon Strachan and Robert Mardian. Many lawyers felt, in the aftermath of Ford's announcement, that the President had given a big boost to the defense...
Searching over the records, two Boston researchers, Dr. David C. Poskanzer and the late Dr. Robert S. Schwab, found that the number of Parkinson's patients diagnosed at Massachusetts General Hospital increased exponentially from the 1920s into the 1960s. Then they noticed something else: with each passing year, the average age of the new patients increased by a year...
...Parkinson's disease has always been wreathed in mystery. For centuries nothing was known of its causes, though it was noted that in many cases it followed an attack of encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. Then, from 1916 to 1926, there came a worldwide epidemic of brain inflammation, caused by a virus and named encephalitis lethargica because the most severely stricken victims spent days or weeks almost comatose and immobile. Some of these patients soon developed full-blown cases of Parkinsonism, marked by alternations of involuntary movements and rigidity, a fixed gaze and a shuffling gait. Even after this...
...Bottles. The two physicians evolved a hypothesis: except for a few rare cases caused by chemical poisoning, the great epidemic of Parkinsonism resulted from something that happened long ago and then ceased. What was that something? Poskanzer has an idea: a mild, probably unrecognized infection with the virus of encephalitis lethargica back in the 1920s could have damaged certain brain cells; later, as the brain's chemistry was impaired with advancing age, the signs of Parkinson's began to appear...
...hypothesis has not been technically "proved"-but he is literally betting that it will be. "I have a reporting system," he points out, "and I offer a bottle of Scotch to any doctor in the U.S. who can send me a report of a clearly diagnosed case of Parkinson's in a patient born since 1931. So far it's cost me 14 bottles-just 14 of these younger patients identified since 1961." If Poskanzer is right, Parkinsonism will subside with the passing of the generation born in the early 1900s and now in their...